Westboro startup helps save lives

Westboro-based Reflectance Medical — its devices use light to read patients' blood chemistry without cutting into them — is helping save soldiers' lives. That's thanks to contracts that Reflectance has signed with two companies that bundle its technology with equipment that medics use on the battlefield to decide who needs the most immediate medical attention.

Reflectance, which has seven employees, is the work of Babs Soller, the daughter of an entrepreneur who decided at a young age that she liked the idea of doing medical research for a pharmaceutical company. As I learned in a July 24 interview, she grew up in New Jersey near the headquarters of pharmaceutical companies like Merck and she admired the work of its researchers. She later decided that she wanted to work on spectroscopy — after earning a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Princeton — a field that combines physics and chemistry.

But when she graduated from Princeton she did not have an option to use spectroscopy in medicine. As she explained, "I never wanted to be in academia. When I graduated, the two best fields were solar energy and semiconductor fabrication. I went to work for Bell Labs in semiconductor process design."

Then her husband moved to Worcester. According to Ms. Soller, "My husband received an offer to be a physics professor at Holy Cross. I followed him to Worcester and got a job at Sperry Research Center, which went out of business in 1983. From there I went to Digital Equipment Corp., where I worked for 7-1/2 years. By the time I left I had created and led a laboratory that did materials analysis."

But DEC was offering big severance packages to its staff and she took the bait. "DEC offered me a generous severance package, and I decided that I would use the outplacement services and cash to try to get out of semiconductors and into medicine. It also helped that by that time my husband was tenured at Holy Cross. Within a few months, I got a job at Bard in Tewksbury as manager of its blood gas analysis unit. It was wonderful managing difficult Ph.D. chemists, but after 18 months Bard shut down the division."

She answered an advertisement in a newspaper for a position at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and got the job. "I applied for and got a job as a research professor in cardiac surgery at UMass Medical School because I knew a new, arcane programming language. I spent 19 years there and learned a ton of stuff working with cardiac surgeons and how to get my own grant money so I could run research programs. It was an ideal environment where I could see what kinds of medical devices that cardiac surgeons needed, and work with physicians and patients to design them and get feedback. It was nirvana," said Ms. Soller.

Reflectance emerged from some of that research. "UMass Medical School had received grants from NASA and the Army. We built a prototype using fiber optics and took it from proof of concept through grant and patent portfolios. I wanted to explore ways to commercialize it and spent a long time working with the UMass Medical School licensing department and thinking about building up a startup."

She launched Reflectance in 2010 and was able to get the help of an investor from Prism VentureWorks whom she respected. "John Brooks started three companies and became a venture capitalist. He had been a great mentor to me and gave me opportunities to get exposed on the national critical care scene. When we started Reflectance, he was between gigs and was looking for something to do. He became CEO for a few years and then went on to become CEO of the Joslin Diabetes Center and became chairman of Reflectance."

When Mr. Brooks left for Joslin, Ms. Stoller stepped in as CEO. "I never intended to be CEO. But we have made progress. On July 19, Reflectance received Food and Drug Administration clearance to sell our Mobile CareGuide 3100, a device that lets medical personnel take blood oxygen and pH readings without a blood sample to identify patients who are about to go into shock on a timely basis. We sell a sensor and a disposable sleeve that is used in military applications to make quick decisions in a bloody battlefield. Our product is particularly useful in detecting internal bleeding, which lets emergency medical technicians get the right patients into surgery fast," said Ms. Stoller.

Reflectance is targeting a large opportunity and has partnered for the manufacturing and distribution skills required to tap the market. Ms. Stoller explained, "The first application for the product is traumatic injuries. Hospitals get 17 million emergency department admissions each year. We outsource the manufacturing of the sensors to a company in California and the disposables to a partner in Massachusetts. And we have distribution partnerships — to which we contributed algorithms for spectroscopy testing and calibration — with Zoll Medical in Chelmsford and Terra Wireless in California. We will spend six to nine months putting it in the hands of physicians and getting data and begin full-scale marketing in 2014."